Letters from Adelaide and Prayagraj

Abstract

The collaborative work consisting of corresponding poems between an Adelaide-based poet Arnis Silvia and a Prayagraj-based poet Susheel Sharma deals with anthropological phenomena like identity, ecological awareness and social justice. Taking the geographical background in both resident cities, the six pairs of poems reflect on how both the poets understand the world around them along with its impact on them personally and socially. The poets have employed some principles of duoethnography in their poetic conversations by dialoguing themselves with another self, with another context of culture, tradition, values, histories and meaning-making (Sawyer & Norris 2012). The authors have attempted to put themselves in someone else's shoes and have tried to see the world through their and others' eyes to better understand the reality(ies) that were portrayed in the poems. The authors have discovered that despite their geographical and cultural differences, they share many similarities in terms of the issues they deal with daily; they struggle with their selves to make sense of the world and they reflect on realities in their surroundings to understand them better. Biographical notes:Arnis Silvia is an Indonesian-born bilingual poet who is currently undertaking a PhD programme in Language and Linguistics, University of South Australia. She tutored English for Creative Writing. She writes poetry in both Indonesian and English and has published two books of poems in Indonesian: Titi Kala Mangsa (2017) and Niskala (2019) and one in English, Behind the Closed Door (2017). She has participated in some poetry open mics in Adelaide. She is a member of some literary groups and has published her English poems in Verse Magazine and HLT Magazine.Dr Susheel Kumar Sharma (b 1962) teaches English at the University of Allahabad, Prayagraj-211002, the fourth-oldest university of modern India. Prof. Sharma has three collections of poems in English viz. From the Core Within (1999), The Door is Half Open (2012) and Unwinding Self (2020) to his credit besides several research papers, interviews and book reviews. Some of his poems have been translated into Assamese, French, Lithuanian, Polish, Sanskrit, Serbian, Turkish and Ukrainian languages.